In recent years, digital imaging technology develops rapidly, and various digital imaging components (such as CCD and CMOS, etc) and electronic imaging devices (such as digital camera, digital camcorders, notebook computers, mobile phones and webcams, etc) are introduced to the market continuously, not only the imaging quality becomes increasingly higher, but the size of the products also becomes increasingly smaller, and the market price drops drastically, and thus these products become more popular. In addition to the function for consumers to take pictures of people and sceneries by using the electronic imaging devices, images can also be stored into a computer, so that consumers can view the pictures anytime. In general, manufacturers also use these electronic imaging devices to operate with an image tracking system for identifying, positioning and tracking one or more specific targets in a series of video frames in order to achieve certain industrial functions and purposes as listed below:
(1) In the area of electronic manufacturing, the aforementioned devices and system are primarily used for guiding robots to perform the tasks of positioning high-precision PCB and mounting SMT components.
(2) In the area of mechanical manufacturing, the aforementioned devices and system are primarily used for identifying components, inspecting quality at a production line, and enhancing the production and yield rate by feedback control.
(3) In the area of the military and national defense industry, the aforementioned devices and system are primarily applied in weapon navigation such as using a weapon system to identify and tracking several moving targets.
(4) In the area of the security industry, the aforementioned devices and system are primarily applied for automatic surveillance for monitoring the situation in the streets, malls, banks or communities, and even providing an intelligent security system for residences when a house owner leaves the house.
(5) In the area of the traffic industry, the aforementioned devices and system are primarily applied for testing and tracking motor vehicles, automatically monitoring violations of motor vehicles and recording the violations.
(6) In the area of sports and matches, the aforementioned devices and system are primarily applied for automatically analyzing the statistics of athletes.
(7) In the area of scientific research, these electronic imaging devices are primarily applied for analyzing animal behaviors and observing motions of a specific object in an experiment.
(8) In the area of the television broadcasting, the aforementioned devices and system are primarily used for continuously shooting a specific target.
(9) In the area of the electronic imaging device, the aforementioned devices and system are primarily used in electronic imaging devices such as digital cameras, digital camcorders and PC cams for detecting and tracking an interesting region of an image automatically, and achieving an automatic adjustment such as an auto focus, an auto exposure and an auto white-balance for assisting beginners to take or shoot continuous images of herself/himself or a specific person/object. Particularly for the use in a chat via a webcam, the webcam can be aimed at the chatters.
In summation of the description above, the electronic imaging device is low-price and fine, and thus becoming increasingly popular. The image tracking system and technology is developed in a fast phase accordingly, in hope of effectively extending the application scope and utility of the electronic imaging devices.
At present, various image tracking systems and software are introduced to the market, and the image tracking algorithm generally computes, positions and tracks feature points of the captured successive frames based on the similarity of mean absolute errors. However, the algorithm for the feature points is too complicated or unable to effectively to improve the significance of the feature points, or unable to achieve the effectiveness of similarity measurement, so that the image tracking systems and software cannot achieve the real-time delivery and precision of an image tracking processing due to a poor robustness of the image tracking algorithm when the background of the images is too complicated. Therefore, it is an important research and development subject for designers manufacturers of electronic imaging devices to find a way of designing an image tracking algorithm with an intelligent tracking function, such that the electronic imaging device can detect and track interesting regions in successive frames automatically in the condition of a too-complicated background of the images, and the image tracking algorithm still has the best robustness to achieve the real-time delivery and precision of the image tracking processing.